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I am very pleased to announce that my latest novel in the Airship Flamel Adventures Series, Mr. Darwin’s Dragon, is now available on Amazon for paperback and Kindle formats and on Smashwords for most other ebook formats. Here’s the synopsis:

Charles Darwin, one of Britain’s most famous and certainly most controversial scientists has a puzzle. How is it that cultures all over the world have ancient myths of dragons? Could dragons have once lived alongside ancient man? Could dragons still exist?

Professor Nicodemus Boffin and his newly launched airship Flamel takes up Darwin’s request to search for evidence of modern dragons. The voyage takes Flamel from Britain through the Middle East and over the Himalayas to China. The search is barely begun when Flamel discovers an illicit gold mine run by Cai Yuan, a cruel Chinese warlord, and his corrupt British collaborator. Professor Boffin and his family are taken hostage in the mine which seems to be guarded by a fierce dragon. The crew of Flamel must rescue them, and together discover whether Mr. Darwin’s dragon truly exists.

The book will be launched next weekend at Clockwork Alchemy, the San Francisco Bay Area’s steampunk con. But that’s not all. I also have written one of the eleven short stories published in an anthology titled, Next Stop on the #13, put together with many of the talented authors that you’ll be able to meet at Clockwork Alchemy.

If you’re interested in Steampunk and in the Bay Area next weekend (March 22-24), I wholeheartedly recommend you attend and take part in the shenanigans. I’ll be in the Author’s Alley section of the Artist’s Bazaar. Come by and say Hi!

Also, come by and see me at the two panels I’ll be presenting. On Saturday at 2:00 pm, I’ll be giving a talk on Steampunk Architecture, and on Sunday at noon, I will be presenting “How to Research” along with the master of alternative history, Harry Turtledove. (I expect to learn more from him than I teach myself.)

On Thursday, 22 November, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving. While, I’m guessing, no other country celebrates giving thanks for what one has on the Fourth Thursday of November (Even Canada celebrates Thanksgiving in October, which I’ve always attributed–perhaps wrongly–to the shorter growing season in the Great White North.), most cultures have some sort of thanks giving holiday.

Google has published an interesting article using the plethora of data they acquire through people asking questions like, “How do I cook a turkey?” or maybe, “Where can I buy a pre-cooked turkey?”, if they were caught short with the unusually early Fourth Thursday in November this year. However, a couple of interesting trends emerge from Google’s analysis. First, pretty much only the northeastern US actually roasts turkey. I grew up in Massachusetts where those religious refugees, the Pilgrims, apocryphally celebrated the first Thanksgiving, and I can’t think of preparing turkey any other way than roasting. What Google categorizes as “Fried”, I have to think must be deep-fried, and I would like to watch that happen, if only for the potential pyrotechnics.

Apple pie, another New England tradition, falls to third place behind pumpkin and pecan. Pecan I’ll leave to the southerners. I don’t even like nuts in my fruit cake. The number one Thanksgiving pie is pumpkin, which I know some people (like my wife) love. I find the very idea of making a pie from the same slimy thing I carve up for Halloween disgusting.

As I was writing this afternoon, I discovered that this paragraph had appeared on my computer screen:

“And what about me, Nicodemus?” asked Jane. “This is the second time in this book series that I’ve been locked in a dungeon!”

I didn’t mean for Jane Boffin (née Faraday) to suddenly become so meta, but there it was. I’ll go back tomorrow, repair the broken fourth wall, and rework the scene, toning down Jane’s impertinence just a bit. (She is imprisoned in a dungeon after all.)

This book (the third I’ve written in the Airship Flamel Adventures series) has been listed on my NaNoWriMo page as having the working title of “There Be Dragons Here”. Although that phrase is encountered in the novel, the story has evolved away from the pirate-y connotation that phase implies. I’m still deciding on a final title. There will be dragons though.

Today, Sept. 22, is the great British scientist Michael Faraday’s 226th birthday.

Faraday’s contribution to science are many, and it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that before Faraday, electricity was batteries, and afterward, it was Edison and Tesla and all the motors, transformers, and generators they unleashed upon the world.

Faraday’s relationship to science can be summed up in two images: First, Faraday at work at the lab bench in the basement of the Royal Institution, and second, Faraday presiding over a Christmas Lecture–specifically designed for the layman, and for children in particular.

Professionally, I work in a field that is the direct descendant of Faraday–electrochemistry–so Faraday has always been a bit of a hero for me. For more information of Faraday’s life and contributions, see here. I’ve even written Professor Faraday into one of my novels as a major character, “The Secret Notebook of Michael Faraday“.

An interesting take on popular history television shows. I wish we could get this program(me) here in the States (not absolutely sure we can–must check), but I’d probably alternate between gazing at the screen in rapture and yelling at it in frustration. Really, how hard is it to get facts straight?

A guest review by LH member Laurence Scales, of the new Channel 5 series.

Feeling a bit lost at present on Saturday nights without a Swedish murder to mull over I turned to Channel 5 and its series, ‘How the Victorians Built Britain’, fronted by Michael Buerk The viewer is invited to bask in the glow of beautifully restored steam engines, magnificent dams and tiled Turkish baths. Land of Hope and Glory is playing in my head even if you cannot hear it. Yes, Victorians were wonderful in many ways. We should all know, of course, that they were frightful in many others. Victorian novelist Thomas Hughes invented ‘rose tinted spectacles’ and we are definitely wearing them here.

It may be that a few more things have been restored to their original glory today, but I doubt that otherwise this series would stand much comparison with a repeat…

Right about the time that diesel locomotives were gaining ground on the older steam locomotives, some railroads redesigned their steam engines. By streamlining their design, the railroads hoped to keep the steam engines running. In some cases, the re-design was made so that the older steam engines would match the look of the diesel locomotives. In others, doubts about the power that could be obtained from diesel engines was the reason. For whatever reason, the result was a collision between traditional engineering design and the leading art movement of the time, Art Deco, to create some amazing examples of railway design.

A description of all that the Art Deco Movement encompasses would take much more than a single blog post. (See the Wikipedia article for a good introduction though.) Suffice to say that Art Deco is in a way a reaction to the earlier movement, Art Nouveau. While Art Nouveau features themes from nature and sinuous curving design elements, Art Deco encompasses more severe geometric forms. Art Deco’s features celebrate the exuberance of the future and its new technologies. One word that is often used to describe Art Deco is streamlined, and that is the exact reason for the redesign of steam engines in the late 1930s: to make them look fast and luxurious. Ironically, little if any performance improvements were realized as the additional weight of the streamlining offset any advantage in lowering wind resistance.